One man's struggle against impermanence
John Wilkins is an aged, eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Queensland, in Australia. After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, John finally completed his thesis on species concepts, which he is working into two books. One has been accepted for publication, and will come out in 2008; the other may be contracted soon. He is also interested in cultural evolution, philosophy of religion, Macintosh computers and his kids (they sort of make it a necessity, you know?).
If anyone knows of a tenurable, or even medium term, job in philosophy of biology, let me know. Have library, will travel. The contract runs out soon...
This blog is designed to host any random thoughts that happen to be passing through my forebrain at a given moment. So there will be errors...
Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion
Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity from Darwin to Intelligent Design (New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine)
Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography
Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality
Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series)
My personal page is here:
The previous instantiation of this blog is accessible here.
December 30, 2006
Category: Creationism
Brent Rasmussen, at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, has a nice smackdown of the atheism-intolerance of Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College and Distinguished Scholar of the City University of New York, with which...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:49 AM • 94 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 25, 2006
Category: Humor
For those of you still in December 25, a short reminder of the meaning of this holiday. There was an individual who was born today, many years ago. His life and work changed the world. He inspired millions of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:04 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Evolution
Larry Moran, at Sandwalk, has argued that evolution is indeed a matter of chance. It is, he thinks, something that atheism requires. This is an interesting issue, one that has deep roots, both in the role of chance explanations...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 6:57 PM • 16 Comments •
December 24, 2006
Category: Creationism
It's a season, so I am told, that has something to do with religion. We celebrate the birth of commodity capitalism, or something. So I thought I would combine my favourite issues - philosophy, religion and evolution. It's all...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:46 AM • 7 Comments •
December 23, 2006
Category: Evolution
My mate Marc Buhler noticed this one: This week's issue of Science magazine has an article that is the subject of a story (pasted below the fold) from the NY Times....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:02 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 21, 2006
Category: Philosophy of Science
Sayeth the Deepak Oracle: A number of evolutionary biologists are attempting to create a more holistic integral view of evolution that includes both objective and subjective dimensions of reality. I don't claim to know what "reality" is, but I'm pretty...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:17 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 20, 2006
Category: Politics
George Bush wants a bigger military. Cynical as I am about the claims of the "military-industrial complex" of a generation ago, it really does look like the underlying motivation for the past decade or so has been to increase the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 9:24 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Humor
Once, in a previous incarnation (where I was not so furry, fat and albinoish), I ruled a graphics department. We had the IT staff try to convince us to go Windows about every six months instead of Mac, for about...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:22 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 19, 2006
Category: Politics
As PZ McMyers notes, the Libyan court has condemned to death five nurses and a doctor for infecting children with AIDS deliberately as part of an experiment, despite the clear scientific evidence that the real cause was pre-existing strains of...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:45 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 18, 2006
Category: General Science
I stumbled on this amazingly useful website just now, when trying to work out who our nearest extragalactic neighbours were (and what they were getting up to - it seems we are the cause of a lot of domestic disputes)....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:57 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 16, 2006
Category: Evolution
Well, I'm just back from the 3rd Queensland Biohumanities Conference, convened by Paul Griffiths, which was titled "Idealization, mechanism and reduction: New Directions in the Philosophy of Proximal Biology". Speakers were Bill Bechtel (UC San Diego), Alex Rosenberg (Duke),...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:35 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Humor
at the front, there'd be this suspiciously familiar primate... My son reckons that a photo of me wouldn't look all that different. My son is about to lose some teeth, I reckon....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:44 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 14, 2006
Category: Humor
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey. C'mon. You knew I'd fall prey to temptation, didn't you?...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:02 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 13, 2006
Category: Humor
9 Chickweed Lane has been making a few pointed comments about academe and teaching that I just have to share. First, a summary of how things are going for me right now: Second, the joys of teaching and marking......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:27 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Logic and philosophy
Chris at Mixing Memory has a couple of interesting posts on religious cognition. They inspired me to present my own hypothesis about the origins of religion, and in particular individual gods......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:02 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
A paper gets retracted in Cell because of image manipulation. Someone needs to tell scientists how not to use PhotoShop when preparing their images. I used to do precisely that to new researchers at the institute I worked at. Here...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:32 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
If things could be created out of nothing, any kind of things could be produced from any source. In the first place, men could spring from the sea, squamous fish from the ground, and birds could be hatched from the...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:02 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 12, 2006
Category: Evolution
It's nice to see a review of some science that neither dumbs it down nor over technifies it. Ars Technica reviews the lactose tolerance gene evolution in African populations....
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:32 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 11, 2006
Category: Logic and philosophy
This site, a faith-based Catholic (I think) news site, has an Op-Ed by an erstwhile science teacher on Dennett's Breaking the Spell. It's not pretty to see someone trying to take down a professional philosopher philosophically, when they are not...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:52 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 9, 2006
Category: Humor
A new war on Christmas is being waged... by a pastor. Forget those secular humanists; the real danger to traditional Christmas is the religious. Santa is "a blasphemous stand-in for God who makes liars of parents and causes confusion among...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:46 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 8, 2006
Category: Politics
What's ironic is that the Vision for Space Exploration ... specifically slated the Shuttle for retirement in just a few short years and mandated a new launch vehicle to replace it. But now, the Administration is refusing to fund its own Vision adequately. They would rather cancel missions from the very part of NASA that has been succeeding so gloriously -- the programs that have brought us Mars Exploration Rovers, Cassini, Stardust, Deep Impact and, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope.
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 10:27 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
Those who know me, or try to proselytise me with petitions or for political party support, know that I am a moral vacuum. At least, that's what I say when they try ("Sorry, I'm a moral vacuum". It gets...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 8:54 PM • 5 Comments •
December 5, 2006
Category: Politics
This is one of the few tests that gives me a ranking I agree with. Even if the questions are too simplistic and the alternatives not exclusive. Your Political Profile: Overall: 15% Conservative, 85% Liberal Social Issues: 50% Conservative, 50%...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:55 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
A recent report on the songs of the eponymous "great tit", a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops of milk bottles in the 1950s, shows that they independently acquire a deeper song when in...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 11:45 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 4, 2006
Category: Philosophy of Science
We may never have a complete or universal science, and there may always be twilight cases, but mostly we are able to tell when something is, and isn't, science, by its parentage and its behaviour...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 1:43 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 3, 2006
Category: Humor
I'm a follower, not a leader. And when John Lynch and Mike the Mad Biologist do something, I must too. I am their terrorism-loving lapdog, I am......
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 7:17 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Google prides itself for being an ethical company. "Do no harm" is their motto, I believe (although some Chinese dissidents may dispute this). But what happens when an honest site is hacked and porn links are included on their index...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 12:02 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 1, 2006
Category: Politics
Last night, the Australian media held their annual awards ceremony, the Walkley Awards. A somewhat funny event occurred when an iconoclastic blogger, founder of Crikey.Com, was presenting an award, and was physically attacked by an obviously drunk political editor from...
Posted by John S. Wilkins at 2:01 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
